58 A REPOR TER AT LARGE D URING the last weeks of the war, the S.S. hureaucracy was occupied chiefly with forging identit) papers and with destroying the paper mountains that testified to six years of systematIc murder. Adolf Eich- mann's department, more successful than others, managed to burn its files- a triumph that achieved little, since prac- tically all its correspondence had been úddressed to other state and Party of- fices, whose files fell into the hands of the Allies \Vhen, in 1 961, Eich- mann was brought to trial in the Dis- trict Court of Jerusalem-before Pre- siding ] udge Moshe Landau, Judge Benjamin Halevi, and ] udge Yitzhak Raveh-there were more than enough documents left to tell the story of the Final Solution (the Nazi code name for the program to extermInate Europe's Jews), and Inost of these had heen made known at the N uremberg T rials and the so-called Successor Trials. The story was confirmed by sworn and unsworn statements, usually gIven by witnesses and defendants in previous tnals and frequently by persons who now were no longer alive. (.,A.!l this, as well as a certain amount of hearsay testimony, was admissi- ble as evidence, hecause Section 15 of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators [Punishment] Law, or so-called Law of 195 U, under which Eichmann was tried, stipulates that a court "may deviate from the rules of evidence" pro- vided it "places on record the reasons which prompt- ed" such deviation.) The Nazi documents and the affidavits were supplement- ed by testimony taken abroad, from SIX- teen witnesses in Germany, Austria, and Italy, who could not come to ] eru- salem, because Attorney General Gide- on Hausner had announced that "we intend to put them on trial for crimes against the Jewish people." (During the first session, he had declared, "And if the defense has people who are ready to come and be witnesses, I shall not block the way. I shaH not put up any obsta- cles," but later he refused to grant them immunity.) The granting or withhold- ing of immunity depended entirely upon the good will of the government, since prosecution under the Law of 1950 is not mandatory. Since it was highly un- likely that any of the sixteen would have i , , b .. ';. . i. . I . '! f "-,' ) EICHMANN IN JéR.USALE-M-V come to Israel under any circum- stances-seven of them were in pris- on-this was a technical point, but it was of considerable importance: it con- stituted a refutation of Israel's claIm that an Israeli court was, at least tech- nically, the "most suitable for d tnal against the implementers of the Final Solution," because documents and wit- nesses were "more abundant than in any other country" -and the claim with respect to documents had been doubtful from the start, since the Israeli archives were founded at a comparatively late date (not until the mid-fifties) and are in no wa} superior to other archives. [t turned out that Israel was the only country in the world where defense wit- nesses, having been NazIs, could not be heard, and where certain witnesses for the prosecution, als,j former N azis- those who had gIven afEda vits in previ- ous trials-could not be cross-examIned by the defense. This was all the more serious because the accused and his lawyer, Dr. Robert Servatius, were not, as Dr. Servatius pointed out, "in a position to obtain their own defense documents." I)r. Servatius submitted a hundred and nine docu- ments, as against fifteen hundred and forty-three submitted by the prosecu- tion. \1oreover, of the hundred and nine only about a dozen originated with the defense, and they consisted mostly of ex- cerpts from books by Leon Poliakoy or Gerald Reit- linger; all the rest, with the exception of seventeen charts drawn by Eich- mann, were picked out of the wealth of material gathered hy the prosecution and the Israeli police. Obviously, the defense counsel received the crumbs from the rich man's table. In fact, as Dr. Serva- tius said, he and Eichmann had neither "the means nor the tIme" to conduct the affair properly; they did not "have at [their J disposal the archives of the world and the instruments of government." (The same reproach had been levelled against the Nuremberg Trials, where the inequality of status between prosecu- tIon and defense was even more glaring. The chIef handicap of the defense, in Nuremberg as in Jerusalem, was that it lacked a staff of trained research- ers who would go through the mass of documents and find whatever might be ...#".. .,. 'i> . åÂ ' O ' '." , useful In the case. Even today, èIghteen years after the war, our knowledge of the immense archival matenal of the Nazi regime rests, to a large extent, on selections made for purposes of prose- cution.) Noone could have been more aware of this decisive disadvantage for the defense than Dr Servatius, who was one of the defense counsels in :r\uremberg. And this makes the ques- tIon of why he offered his services to hegin with even more interesting. His own answer to this question was that he wished "'to make money," but he must have known, from his N uremberg ex- perience, that the sum paid him by the Israeli government-twenty thousand dollars, as he himself had stIpulated- was ridiculously inadequate, even though Eichmann's family in Linz had given him another fifteen thousand Inarks F or the positIon the defendant took on what he had done, the court could rely upon the detailed statement he had made to the Israeli police examiner, supplemented by many handwritten notes he handed in during the eleven month,; needed for the preparation of the trial. That these were voluntary statements no one ever attempted to deny, and, in fact, Inost of them were not even elicited by questions. Eichmann was confronted with sixteen hundred documents, and it turned out that he must have been familiar with some of them, because they had been shown to him in Argentina, in 1955, during an interview with the Dutch journalist Willem S. Sassen-which Mr. Hausner, with some justification, called a "dress rehearsal." But he started working on them seriously only in Jerusalem, and when he was put on the stand, it soon became apparent that he had not wasted his time; he now knew how to read doc- uments-something he had not known during the police examination-and, for that matter, could do it better than his lawyer. Eichmann's testimony in court turned out to be the most important evi- dence in the case. His counsel put him on the stand on ] une 20th, during the sev- enty-fifth seSSIon, and interrogated him almost uninterruptedly for fourteen SeS- sions, concluding on July 7 tho That same day, during the eighty-eighth ses- sion, the cross-examination by the prose- cution began, and it lasted for seventeen sessions-up to the twentieth of July. There were a few incidents: Eichmann once threatened to "confess every- thing," Moscow stvle, and he once com- plained that he was "grilled until the